Still no unlimited music subscription option. No way to rip or transcode video content. iTunes LPs and Extras lacking. Not enough HD movies or rentals in the iTunes Store. Tracks and albums often cost more than at Amazon MP3.

Bottom Line

Apple cements its status at the market leader for music playback software with iTunes 9. It's a significant revamp that finally fixes media synchronization between computers, and makes the iTunes Store more inviting than before.

The iTunes Store Remodels
The most visible improvement in iTunes 9 appears when you fire up the iTunes Store (which, incidentally, requires Safari 4.0.3 to be installed on the Mac, but not on the PC). Apple has completely revamped the store's main view. A new navigation bar sits permanently on the right side of the screen. Several animated highlights featuring new content are front and center. There's plenty of extra white space all around, giving the store a fresh, organic look. Across the top, you can drop down several main categories for music, movies, audiobooks, and other content. To compensate for the lost real estate, the home page scrolls down further. You can still browse by individual media subcategory (such as alternative music). To do so, you now click and hold the mouse button over the main category buttons. Overall, it all looks good, andI can't believe I'm about to write thisseems as if Apple took a cue from the minimalist Zune Marketplace to simplify the iTunes Store's design.

Previewing and buying tracks is also easier. Pass the cursor over a given track and several things happen. A blue preview icon appears to the leftuseful for hearing multiple tracks without having to navigate down to each one anymore. In addition, a Buy button containing the price appears on the right, along with a down arrow that contains a hidden drop-down menu for gifting a track, adding it to a wish list, or sharing it on Facebook or Twitter. The social networking features worked fine in testing. In Facebook, a song showed up with an album cover graphic and a link to the iTunes Store item, and a Twitter share just showed the artist and title, plus a bit.ly link to the store. Again it's not a shocking innovation, but it lets iTunes catch up with social networking trends a bit.

Individual artist, track, and album pages are also different, with simpler designs, larger graphics, and larger fonts in music track lists. The latter take up much more of the screen now, and are no longer crammed into a tiny frame at the bottom of the iTunes window. As before, 256-Kbps DRM-free AAC tracks cost anywhere from 69 cents to $1.29, with most at 99 cents and many new releases at $1.29. This is still more expensive than Amazon MP3, which trails iTunes in other features (particularly music discovery and online video) but remains a killer destination for bargain-priced music in the ubiquitous MP3 format. Movies, TV shows, and audiobooks are also very well represented, along with the nifty, upgraded iTunes U section for taking free classes. I'd still like to see more movie rentals and HD content in the store, but at this point it's up to the studios and Apple to negotiate the right deals.

A Few Disappointments
Other new features in the iTunes Store include iTunes Extras, which show up as additional content for certain movies (14 at the time of this writing). The content can range from exclusive video clips to behind-the-scenes footage, interviews with cast members, commentaries, "making of" videos, and photo galleries. You get a quick summary in the beginning, but you can also click "More" several times and see additional text and credits when available. Unfortunately, iTunes 9 doesn't tell you what the extras actually are before you make a purchase, however.

Another gripe is that many moviesincluding prominently featured Pixar favorites like Wall-Estill aren't available in HD. (Note: I also tried viewing an iTunes Extra movie on a computer that still had iTunes 8.2.1 installed; it displayed a message at that top that said "Some items on this page may require an upgrade to the latest version of iTunes.") The same goes for the new iTunes LPs. The idea is nice, as it features animated lyrics and liner notes along with videos and interviews. But the selection is currently sparse (just 11 albums), and you don't know exactly what each LP includes.

One perennial con to iTunes is the lack of a subscription option for unlimited music listening. That's for a narrower but loyal market that Rhapsody and Napster still serve wellparticularly Napster, with its revamped UI and blowout $5-per-month price that includes five downloaded MP3s. And there's still no easy way to manage recorded video content with iTunes 9. Apple knows its game and sticks to it; it would rather you bought lots of high-profit individual pieces of media a la carte in the iTunes Store than record your own. (That said, Cupertino just shoehorned an FM radio into the iPod nano, after dozens of competitors so equipped came and went over the years, so anything is possible.)

With iTunes 9, Apple is pulling further and further away from the pack. Even as standalone iPod sales crest and begin to stabilize as the music-playing cell phone market grows, Apple's ecosystem remains the most sophisticated and well integrated for organizing and managing your media.

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Jamie Lendino is the Editor-In-Chief of ExtremeTech.com, and has written for PCMag.com and the print magazine since 2005. Recently, Jamie ran the consumer electronics and mobile teams at PCMag, and before that, he was the Editor In Chief of Smart Device Central, PCMag's dedicated smartphone site, for its entire three-year run from 2006 to 2009. Prior to PCMag, he was a contributing editor for Laptop and mediabistro.com. His writing has also appeared in the print editions of Popular Science, Electronic Musician, and Sound and Vision,...
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